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This question seems very moot to me at this point. It reminds me a bit of the "should we let gays into the military" controversy of a few years back.

The fact is, there are and have been gays in the military for the last 10,000 years. There are and have been gay marriages for 10,000 years. The state may not legally recognize such unions and the military may not ask and may not be told, but don't kid yourselves.

And how have those gays in the military faired for the last 10,000 years? Limp-wristed pansy-boys who throw grenades like a girl? Alexander the Great was a half-way decent soldier and military strategist, I do believe, eh? And he was gayer than a three dollar bill.

And I'm sure there are thousands of well-adjusted, mature, emotionally stable productive adults in nearly every nation on earth who were raised by two mommies, two daddies, 1 mommy, 1 daddy, 3 daddys, 2 mommies/four daddies and a step-aunt twice removed.

Again, maybe this isn't all legally recoganized and accepted and voted on by the majority of the population, but it happens nevertheless and I don't see fire and brimstone raining down from above as a result.

 

That's just it, you can pretty much do that in Britain (or sperm donars for Lesbians) and the law can't possibly prevent it. As Aldeth has pointed out, single people can also adopt in the UK.

 

I think you're missing most of the anti-gay-marriage points. The problem isn't that gay couples should be allowed civil union, the problem is rather wehther gays should be allowed to marriage - in a church. Mind you that a civil union is not a marriage.

How many people do you know who was raised by a homosexual couple? Maybe you don't see any fire and brimstone raining down on your path, but maybe, just maybe the child does.

Personally I'm somewhat leaning toward allowing gay couples to adopt, but again, some of the statements mentioned above are my exact worries regarding this.

 

Actually, I think the main reasons people have children (whether biologically or through adoption) are selfish reasons. As someone who is considering becoming a father in the not-too-distant future, I have thought about this a lot. No matter how I try and spin it, it all comes down to my wife and I "wanting" a child. Any reasoning involving the child is groundless, because until we actually take the step and become pregnant, the child does not exist as an entity. So any reason comes back to the parents' own desires, not the child's and is then, by definition, selfish. You can argue that it is "mutually selfish" as usually both prospective parents want children, but it is still selfish nonetheless.

Quite honestly, I can see Chev's point easier than I can see Tal's point. Chev is consistent in his argumentation. He doesn't agree with gay marriage, and as such, he doesn't want to give further validation to what is to him an already flawed union by allowing them to adopt children. IMO, if you are going to allow gays to marry, then they should get all the other rights that other married couples have, including the right to adopt children. And the same goes for civil unions, as we are only arguing semantics at that point.

Reasoning regarding marriage vs. civil unions being a semantic issue: Technically, you can only be "married" by some religious figure. It is a sacrament that can be performed in a church, temple, synogouge (sp?), etc. The term "marriage" has a religious conotation. On the other hand, someone who gets "married" by a constable, justice of the peace, judge, etc. is technically entering into a "civil union" as it was performed not by a religious authority figure, but by a state figure (ergo civil). However, in terms of rights and benefits, the two are viewed as equivalent (at least here in the U.S.) I was married in a church. One of my good friends was also married in a church. I also have two other good friends who were married by a justice of the peace and a judge. Two of us entered into a marriage, and two of us entered into a civil union, but we are all treated exactly the same way in terms of rights and benefits. So if you want to allow gay civil unions, but against gay marriage, all you're really doing is saying there will be no religious conotation involved. In terms of rights, everything is the same.

So... If people who are married have the same rights and benefits as people who are in a civil union, it seems only reasonable that people who are gay and are legally together in a civil union should get the same benefits as staight people in a civil union, so they should be able to adopt. Basically, I'm saying that we need consistency. It's OK to be pro- gay adoption and pro- gay marriage/civil unions. It's also OK to be anti- gay adoption and anti- gay marriage/civil unions. It just doesn't make sense to be pro- gay civil unions, but anti- gay adoption.

 

Er - so are you against adoption in general? Those points there could be used against pretty much any form of adoption, not just gay adoption. After all, if they're adoption then they're not procreating to keep the species going, nor continuing the family line...

 

this topic clarifies why the UN works so bad. Holland was one of the first nations where this is legal.(Not sure if it was the first) So far no problems have come out in the media regarding all those things gays are accused from by the people who dislike them.

As for adoption. you mean adopt a orphan from a third nation country or ordering one. That is the big issue with adoption. I think millions of orphans want a home. They do not mind if it are two gay people, as long as it is explained to them on time. For ordering one you should be hanged.

A homosexual is not per definition a better parent

 

How do you know what the child wants? If you know it better than the child itself, why couldn't Tal or I? And it's not always children from the third world. Besides, third world is a large concept and material wealth isn't everything. What makes a first worlder think a third world child would feel better from merely being better off? What children need is a family and even if some of them could actually accept a flawed family of two parents of the same gender and adopting mixed gender roles, it doesn't mean that it's good for them. Focusing on what people want and not giving a thought to what people really need, what's good for them, is the so called liberal disease. That's what makes capitalism bad. It's not true that if you want something, no evil is done to you by giving it. Besides, children don't have the life experience to imagine how growing up in a gay environment will affect them.

Or they are properly married and performing normal gender roles but can't have children while they can afford some?

Besides, it's natural if you're a woman and want children with a man. It's natural if you're a man and want children with a woman. It isn't natural if you are a man and want children with a man or a woman and want children with a woman. That isn't going to happen. The concept is broken. Giving it a provisional fix by setting up one little fiction, that gay couples are as good potential parents as normal families, leads to even more fiction and confusion. All that in the name of democracy and rights.

@Tal: Don't you think some of the benefits given to marriages have a family with children in mind? Especially tax benefits and other such? The state isn't acting as a benevolent matchmaker, helping people set up a warm nest with a desired partner but rather seeing to it that the future of the nation is assured. I'd rather avoid giving people the notion that homosexual unions are as good as normal families. There is a share of people that shares its moral and ethical views after the law. Many are heavily influenced. Gay organisations would be given another weapon...

@Merlanni: Agreed that ordering children instead of adopting orphans is wrong.

 

I'm not buying that presumption that with gay couples one of them is pretending to represent the opposite gender. Maybe some do that, but I hardly think it's a rule of thumb. Homosexual couples don't need to be a butch and a femme.

 

This 'homosexuality is unnatural' thing I'm still not getting. There doesn't seem to be any evidence for that line of debate - while the mere existence of homosexuality would suggest that it is. If it isn't natural - then what the hell is it? Are they monsterous androids created in the depths of an evil scientist's laboratory or something...?

 

If you are female and pretend to put it in or if you're male and take it in, that's already a gender role. So unless we're talking about platonic homosexualism...

The only evidence we need is the fact that homosexual sexual behaviour emulates (and imperfectly so) heterosexual behaviour.

 

I have said it before and I will probably say it again. If the choices are to let children grow up in institutions of various states (some utterly horrible) or even the streets or to be adopted by gay people with whatever stigmatisation and social experimitation that might entitle I vote the gay couple.

Every kid is more or less ****ed up by their parents and I have a hard time seeing gay people managing to botch the job more than any straight couple.

 

You would never make it as a scientist chev, whether it be genetics, physics, or even behavioural. One piece of evidence is not all that is needed. Even the effects of radiation were not solidly proved negative until after several uniform cases of exposure. That may not mean we should subject people to it just to see, but there must be demonstrable proof.

Not only that, but I wonder why you call it heterosexual behaviour and not just loving behaviour. I had no idea that straight people had a patent on normal attitudes toward their partners. For that matter, not all males are dominant and all females submissive; they're not gender roles, just structure roles. (Not to mention that in a good marriage it's more complicated than that, but...)

 

you made both points yourself, chevalier.

By the way I am sorry I let myself in with this topic. It is not for game forums.

 

Felinoid, I call it sexual behaviour. Let's not talk about love, which is not a biological or physiological term. You would have to place it somewhere in the intersection between friendship and sex and there's a whole lot of humane arts inside.

Sexual behaviour is behaviour triggered by impulses pointing towards reproduction. Sexual behaviour is all about man and woman complementing each other and producing offspring. Gay sex still seeks to emulate those patterns. Consider attachable rubber penises lesbians use or the ways in which male homosexuals perform insertion. It's all emulation of normal behaviour.

I have to disappoint you but evolution (or God Himself directly, or nature metaphysically or whatever you believe) didn't specifically create "loving" behaviour and leave humans the choice of doing it one way or another. Humans were given normal ways of reproduction (and impulses leading thereto) and perversion happened, whether it's a genetic mutation or acquired personality disorder, it's essentially reduced to emulating reproduction processes.

Sorry to say that, but you wouldn't really make it far as a logical scientist starting from almost literary concepts and taking a whole lot of compassionate or politically correct assumptions as granted.

Evidence that it's natural is quite extensive but we don't need to seek further when we see that it essentially comes down to aping reproduction of the species between specimens of the same gender. It's not an alternative way, it's a perversion of a natural process.

If you consider love... call love what you will. Over millenia, it used to be perfectly normal to love your friends, be it people of your own gender or the opposite and married to someone else. Heck, the Bible is full of that, so one can't even say it's alien to the judeochristian culture. Sometimes physical signs of such affection were similar to those between lovers. So holding hands, kissing, whatever. But sex is a different thing. You love your relatives, can more or less assess if they are attractive or not, but you don't have sex with them. Same with the opposite gender.

And it's not so simple as being dominant or submissive, either. In hetrosexual sex, you have really screwed roles when, let's say, the woman uses a rubber penis on the man's anus. Or whatever such. Giving up control for a while doesn't cut it.

 

The one and only evidence we need to ponder when discussing the validity of homosexuality is that same sex couples love and care for one another, stand in for one another.
What in our existence is more precious than our capacity to care for someone else? It's an universal human trait (I havent given up on that belief of mine) and one of our few redeeming qualities. Dont make it look as if gays can merely hope to mimic rather than truely experience what makes us all actually human.

 

Yeesh chev, get your mind out of the gutter. If you want to talk sex, that's one thing, but don't automatically assume that's what I'm going to talk about. If you really think that what their parents do in private will somehow harm little children, then you must be a bigger believer in telepathy than even me. As for sexual roles, I wasn't aware that straight people had a patent on their methods either. Sex is about pleasure, and what works, works; if you think they're aping reproduction, that's just your misconception.

I admit that barging in on homosexual parents in the act would be considerably more damaging than barging in on a man and a woman doing it right, but fetishes like the one you just named would be far worse than even that. Taking care is the name of the game here; if you really want to prevent that kind of trauma, there have been a few successful societies that segregated the sexes until adulthood...

What I was talking about was the only parts that the children will actually see, the loving relationship between two adults. Who fills what role and what gender they are can change a child's development, but it's not something you can regulate on straight couples, much less gay couples.

 

This is not something I have first hand experience in, but from what I've read and heard, quite a few lesbians *aren't* into strapons and dildos. They don't need a substitute for a man.

And what about straight couples who sometimes practice...erm...*insertion* much the same way gays do? Are they perverts too, a blight upon nature? Or people using birth control, are they interrupting nature's work? Or should people with fertility problems not have sex, because the purpose can't be fulfilled?

Looking at the "purpose" of sexual impulses being there in the first place, producing offspring surely is it. But a vast majority of all sexual activity, be it hetero or gay or whatever, happens without babies in mind. If one believes there is a creator behind it all, and a "mission" for us to fulfill, sex and progeny probably are inseparable, but the human mind (or animal mind for that matter) doesn't work that way. I don't believe even a religious person, when intimate with their partner, gives much thought to being being fruitful and populating the Earth, passing on the genes.

In the grand scheme of things, assuming there *is* a grand scheme, the purpose is procreation. But in each person's mind, it rarely is. Not at that moment. So what difference does it make?

 

Well, homosexual adoptions would be a lot better than any institutional care, and if someone thinks differently they have a screw loose. There are not many worse ways to grow up than in a cold loveless enviorment, that can't be good for the child. I don't think we have that problem in here though. Atleast from what I've heard it's very difficult to get an adopted child around here. In any case I would consider homosexuality a minus when considering adoption but would not have it as illegal.

 

You are changing the subject. If the issue at hand is sexual behaviour and gender roles, it takes a lot of naivete to believe it can be discusses without even looking at technicalities. You well know that I'm not saying that behaviour itself will affect children. The fact is that behaviour doesn't come out of the blue and is an indication of a tendency. If someone engages in unnatural sexual practices, especially pretending to have organs of the other gender, that person has screwed up gender roles and thus can't teach proper ones by example.

And who says that? You just know that sex is for pleasure because you're a great scientist... because, well, all scientists know that sex is for pleasure and to say otherwise is bigotry, huh? Sorry, I don't buy that and I'm not going to accept your set of preconceptions as facts.

Apparently, in your language, "just your misconception" is whatever doesn't agree with your preconceptions that you expect people to accept without further comment. The natural purpose of sex is reproduction and for that purpose species have been given reproductive organs. Not for pleasure. Pleasure is a part of the process of reproduction, added to it, and it's not like reproduction was added at some point or thrown into a process of achieving pleasure. If someone doesn't understand this, the person has a problem not with science but with basic thinking and that problem isn't even inability but unwillingness. Turning basic logic upside down because it's trendy isn't science. It's politics and not even of a lofty kind.

What are you talking about and what's the relation with the subject, anyway?

And passing a law enabling gay people to adopt is what else than regulation? And quite revolutionary at that.

Erm, so the child is supposed to understand that on one day John is dad and Frank is mum and on the other day John is mum and Frank is dad? A mum with moustache and a dick? Sorry. That doesn't work.

Well, they don't. So they don't have sex... well, because they can't, anyway.

They aren't but what they do is, yes. And by doing that they are turning themselves more and more into tools of that, media to transfer that disease.

Yes.

No. What fault trying? Maybe it will work. One can't be sure.

Really? Or is that a result of contraceptives coupled with mixed up priorities, subjecting people's lives to their sexual drives? We look upon a person as a slave of his drives if he lives for his stomach or for his throat... then why not if he lives for his genitals? Here's the news: some people have hobbies. Some people talk.

That's included in the union itself. Besides, in Christianity (and I suppose in Judaism as well, and possibly in Islam) a belief that sex is only for procreation is as wrong theologically as a belief that it's disconnected. Also, even if the mind isn't thinking about prolonging the species, that's still what's happening. It's not like people had contraceptives running in their living blood until someone invented pregnancy.

The difference is that heterosexual sex is basically procreation (even if it isn't procreation attempted for its own sake in the most "brutal" way, i.e. to increment the counter), while gay sex relies on pretending you are procreating, pretending you're able to. Optionally, silencing everyone who says you can't and making sure the law supports your illusions. Calling chev homophobe does great things to the mood, as well.

The loose screw doesn't scare me away from distrusting the generalisation. We can't really speak of children being shown gender and family roles when they are brought up more in the class and teacher model. They will still need to be told what dad and mum is. But children from orphanages still find their way with adoptive families somehow. Adding gay families to the pool would screw it up.

Gay people may believe that they are normal and they may even believe that other people should believe they are. However, I don't want that belief to be ingrained in the population. I don't want any even partially "gay is okay" generation to be brought up. This isn't only true of gay lib. It's true of many kinds of such movements.

Hmm.. but wouldn't that stance ultimately lead to some gay rights movement claiming that there shouldn't be better and worse adoption, that whoever is able to adopt should be treated equally etc etc and winning a case before a "progressive" judge? Besides, what with the pet factor? What with the fact that the child will be destined to serve creating and maintaining an illusion of something that isn't true, i.e. that two men or two men can build a normal family, able to have children?

[ December 25, 2005, 03:44: Message edited by: chevalier ]